New Login Designs - New Problems

I posted something a few weeks about about bad design and noted the issues with single sign-on or the lack thereof.

Recently I came across this post which looks at an emerging issue with a user's ability to login using authentication via an entirely different service, such as Facebook.

This is a login option I don't tend to use - I prefer to keep everything separate - but I thought these stats were interesting, noting how often folks end up with multiple accounts and still can't remember their login:

"User Interface Engineering's analysis of a major online retailer found that 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, 160,000 people requested passwords per day, and 75% of these people never completed the purchase they started once they requested their password. Ouch."

The folks at bagcheck illustrate an approach they're trying in order to help make this type of login easier for the end-user. I like that they show they're process and how it evolves.

What does strike me as odd is that you can see all these other user names when you search for your own... that seems worrisome.

Article: http://bagcheck.com/blog/02-design-solutions-for-new-log-in-problems

Javascript UI Libraries - Bridging the Gap Between UX Designers and Web Developers

I decided to finish my blog posts with the same topic that I started with - the gaps between the developers and designers. Responses to my first post were interesting and insightful.

Again, I remember people talking about developers shooting down their UX ideas because they simply don't think it is possible given the time-constraints. Javascript UI libraries are rapidly evolving into the role of saviors for both UX designers and developers. There are several javascript libraries out there that makes the job of manipulating a web-page's objects within it's Document Object Model very easy. In addition many common widgets that are used most frequently while designing websites are now emulated by simple to use Javascript libraries. Examples of these commonly used widgets are - Accordions, Drop Down Menus, Dialog Boxes, Minimizable boxes etc,.

Following are a few of the many Javascript UI libraries that make the use of these widgets as easy as a couple of lines of code.

YUI

JQuery UI

MochaUI

Scriptaculous

Livepipe

AlloyUI

XUI

Knowledge of the features of these libraries would strengthen your case when a software developer shoots down your proposal stating 'lack of time' as a reason. Software developers in turn can turn themselves into amazing UX developers without much effort if they are familiar with these wonderful tools. Adding new UX features to their repertoire everyday, these libraries are bridging the gap between designers and developers.

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Opportunities for UX Improvement in Retail Websites

My curiosity to know if there are any websites or UX firms that examines different websites for usability metrics led to a few fairly interesting companies, individual blogs and websites. One of my favorite studies conducted by Usography is this UX audit.

Usography reviewed 100 top retail web sites and presented their findings in "Retailer UX Audit". The sites were rated according to a list of 30 user experience feature criteria (listed in the article). The founder of Usography, Paul Bryan, summarized their findings in this article on UXbooth.com. It is interesting to note that on a scale of 30 two companies were were tied for first position. What is more interesting is the fact that these two companies implemented 16 out of the 30 features. I'm sure the article would be even more fascinating to people who worked on the 'Individual Class Project 3' (Socialite) or participated in an in-class activity where we discussed about ideas for a shopping application with social features. Aren't you thrilled to see that some of the best features that were found to be missing from many sites were actually discussed during the in-class activity? For example we discussed about features related to price comparison and visual try-ons. Though companies like Buy.com and Amazon.com which are online-only retailers take the top spots, they only implement half of the features used as the evaluation criteria. This tells us that even in case of mature companies there is a significant potential for UX improvement. I do not believe that implementing all 30 features would increase the sites overall usability. Also a thorough cost-benefit analysis should precede the decision to support implementation of any of the listed features. However this audit provides tremendous value to the companies by pointing-out areas of improvement, without the companies having to invest in a UX evaluation.

Note: Do check-out Usography's website and services. They have an interesting business model and offer several design services with a lot of focus on evaluation.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words...er...Page Hits

The saying is true and Stew Langille, former VP of marketing at Mint, is out to prove it with his new startup visual.ly. Visual.ly will attempt to build a community, market and tools for infographics. Later this year, visual.ly plans to release Web-based “prosumer” tools for editorial, marketing, student and other users to create their own shiny infographics.

According to Langille, some of the most successful posts on Mint.com's site, that garnered the site its user base, were the posts including infographics. These posts would receive 30 to 40 times the page views of non-infographic posts.

Visual.ly hopes to make creating attractive infographics from user data easy--particularly easier than creating them with non-data driven programs like Adobe Photoshop. These designs can then be tweeked and shared as desired.

It is an interesting idea and I'm looking forward to trying it out. Making attractively designed infographics in Illustrator or Photoshop is not always ideal. I'm curious to see how they'll create different themes or styles so all the infographics do not begin to seem the same. A few of my favorites shown so far are True Colors: Color Preferences By Gender, Mars Missions and The Evolution of the Geek.